


how they dreamt

by superkawaiifreak



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: AkuRoku - Freeform, AkuRoku Month, I Will Go Down With This Ship, M/M, New York City, Slice of Life, otp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25799980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superkawaiifreak/pseuds/superkawaiifreak
Summary: Axel listens to the same podcast every day on his commute to work. He wears the same clothes, drinks the same coffee, never goes to happy hour. Then there is the chance encounter in which he meets Roxas, a homeless singer, at a Chinese restaurant. [Let's meet again, in the next life.] Akuroku, Akuroku month.
Relationships: Akuroku, Axel/Roxas
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13
Collections: Akuroku Week 2020





	how they dreamt

**Author's Note:**

> Edited this piece for pronouns and general flow. I used to have this up as part of a larger work, but I took that down a few months ago. This story, though, always brings a smile to my face, and I wanted to share it as a part 8/13 love.

_._

Axel Marrin, sitting on the third cushion to the left of aisle C, stares straight forward, eight years of commuting now a nonchalant comfort, and he listens to a podcast on criminal intent. Like Axel, we privilege ourselves the thought that none of this otherness applies to us: the moral degradation, the didactic rules governing insatiability, rag-and-bone fashion, yardsticks of spiked frozen lemonade, sex under the stars. These activities are the stuff of Hollywood nightmares and dreams; they serve specific purposes, whether to inspire, to incite fear, to incense, and are obscured by finances. King Capitalism, he is a paradoxical man, teasing law-abiding citizens like us with thoughts of wild, unsynchronized dancing while making these Nietzschean bacchanals impossible. The scalpel of peer pressure slices deeply into our lives, we say, as we wipe the vomit from our infants’ mouths; it is the externality that has hammered us into the modal perfection, not us. It is why you are forced to dream a dream-house closer to your work than to the open coast. 

Axel’s suits have been pressed for the week — navy this time. He is a bit nervous to introduce this new palette at work, the Metropolitan Intercity Railway. It is the Monday after the season’s first real sea storm; he smells with abandon the dried rain on concrete, he wonders how pizza might have tasted while sitting on the pier, wonders how his feet might feel if they were to dip in the salty Pacific on a lunch break. The train slows to a well-timed stop; it is his station. He rises politely, gingerly brushes along the passerby, similarly occupied by the unsocial social media quelling the humanity in their faces, and exits with a firm two-step rhythm toward that gate, his beating heart anticipating the softness of the swivel chair in his east-facing office. He tastes the coconut milk latte, its froth on his tongue, in his mind’s eye, and fuels the half-mile walk to his building with thoughts of valediction to the rest of the whirring world.

“Mr. Marrin?”

“Y-yes,” Axel tore his eyes from his notepad. “Pardon me. What was that?”

“The Chamber of Commerce called. Tifa said she is very sorry, but she must reschedule your lunch today. Family emergency.”

He nodded, nonplussed. “Right,” he dropped his pen on the floor, “thank you, Aerith.” She smiled politely, a small acknowledgement of her always temporary presence in his office, and quietly exited. 

It was about 11:43 A. M. before he was able to finally rationalize the canceled meeting; in his six years of being an executive, he had never rescheduled. This was, in part, due to his own disdain to wasting time. The weight of his reputation also scared off customers and clients from canceling. The industry word on Axel Marrin was one of few phrases: timely, no-nonsense, succinct. In the darker corners of happy hour, though, he was described in less kind words: mundane, flaccid. Excruciatingly boring. Unhappy. He meandered too far from the thoughts put forth by his podcasts. In a perverse move, he thought, he picked up the Criminality: Minds Exposed title on advice from a colleague; even then, he listened for fifteen minutes at a time, on the train — always on the train — protected by the fluorescent sterility, the polished leather shoes surrounding his own, the expensive perfumes. He took great pride in having been the lead engineer for the city’s main subway system. Their trains’ punctuality rivaled Tokyo; their train operators boasted higher pays than most. 

During his time in college, he spent most of his time between internships and books, always polishing with finer and finer granularity the skills of his resume. There was the summer he spent in Spain, once, with a wad of cash he won from a robotics competition; he doesn’t think of this time often, if at all. He does remember programming the software for his robot, though, his elegant, metal keepsake. The code, he found, was too weighty, too cumbersome; he spent three straight days using substitution, transitive properties, natural language processing. Horns blaring down on him, he gently padded the lines on lines with easier-to-read comments, and suddenly, his Professor of A. I. was flashing bright camera lights in front of him, spiffing him up with slicked-back hair and brown loafers. He remembers smiling widely while looking into hundreds of camera holes, perplexed mostly, words and shouts of “college genius” and “future Zuckerberg” inundating him completely. He didn’t want to go to Spain, he remembers; but when your best friend shouts, for the eighth time in a row, “You fucking NEED to go somewhere wild, man! You have 20K!”, you go. 

That was how it felt to die, he thought, running around in the hot, dusty air with thin fabric on his shoulders, chugging soured wine that purpled his vision and pounded his skull. There was a bull — at least he thinks there was a bull — chasing him, or he was chasing it, and he hears the sound of skin-slapping sex beneath the risers of the golden-clad Chamber Chorus from So-and-So University. 20K and he only spent three thousand of it. The booksellers, the servers, singers, riveters, and pickpockets all muttered at him in Spanish, a class he bothered to take because Spaniards can’t program, not like him, not by a mile — and he remembers one night, slumping against the stony wall of some restaurant, punch drunk and lips redder than a rose, hearing a distant voice. It wasn’t beautiful, he remembers thinking; but can a person blind to their own beauty recognize it in forms other than physical? There he was, a tanned American boy with rust-colored hair that traveled to the nape of his neck, sitting in blissful Spain, wine pumping his blood and coloring his lovely cheeks; dark-haired women giggled upon his approach, even small children gaped at his sculpted beauty; and he sat, miserably, wishing only for the comfort of his Lenovo, a rubber duck, and lathering soap.

* * *

  
  


His throat has been raw for five days now. Manuka honey, the legendary elixir, has not aided the process of vocal renewal; he is scheduled to sing for the city in only seven days. It is one the most glitzy gigs of the year, coming with a fat paycheck of 10K for one performance, and he desperately needs the money. After his eviction, he’s been sleeping on his old college roommate’s couch, his person reduced to a carry-on sized suitcase, a linen bag for his day job at the restaurant, a garment bag for his performance clothes, and dental floss. The floss is everywhere: every bag holds it, and he realizes it is bordering on neurotic to keep so many with him, but dental isn’t covered on any insurance he’s ever had, and his shiny smile brings in an extra 3K a month. And he needs the money, he reminds herself yet again, falling back into a cavernous sleep, the lumpy cushions of the couch digging into the wrong places along his spine.

“You still sick?” Sora asked, a towel covering his torso.

Roxas nodded pathetically. “Yeah. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

He grunted in acknowledgement. “You don’t look bad. Here,” he got down on his knees to feel his forehead with his lips. “You’re not hot. No fever. Good,” he padded across the wooden floors to the kitchen, shuffling around in the cabinets. “This is ma-po tofu. I swear by it. Eat it with some hot tea, and I think you’ll feel better.”

He gave a weak _“thanks!”_ and watched Sora dart to his bedroom. _Ma-po tofu. As if._

* * *

  
  


“Po tofu?” Roxas asks for the third time, embarrassment seeping into his eyes. “It’s supposed to be hot, like a soup.” He ended up going out, like he usually does, some sort of cyclical punishment to herself. He really can’t afford it. 

From the corner of his eye, he sees a man looking at him, a business type, and he rolls his eyes, bored. The server looks at him again, his English the worst he’s heard in months, and he bows politely, says something unintelligible and leaves.

For a moment, he looks over the menu again, confused. _What the fuck?_ He wants to feel better, that’s it, and why is it a difficult thing to ask of someone else, to get food for him? 

His mom visited the day before. They met in Central Park because it doesn’t exactly make for a compelling conversation, to show off his rags and poverty and say that he sort-of owns the kitchen but not really. He can see it now: “Hey, Mom. How are things going for me? Well, let’s see, I’m about to finish paying off my debt to Juilliard, so that’s good. But I also work too much, barely make enough net income to eat, and I’m technically homeless, bumming off my old roommates. I’m also seriously considering sucking dick for cash. I eat out too much and was evicted last month. I’m singing at the Met next week. I still don’t have health insurance.”

His mom wrote out a check of eight thousand to Roxas, said that she missed him, and when would he come home? New York was rough, and there were a lot of great opportunities in Cincinnati, too. Roxas left abruptly, their post-dinner walk having gone for far too long, said he’d call, both knowing he wouldn’t. In a huff, Roxas picked up his silk scarf from Saks, disappeared into the bustling nothingness that was New York. His mom hailed a cab to the airport. Four minutes into the ride, and she started crying, sniffling. 

But Roxas never saw this part: he only saw the holier-than-thou dismissal. He saw the past in his mother’s eyes, a sort of dilated truth of the years his mother spent alienating him. When would he start doing something serious, did he think about having kids anytime soon, didn’t he know that past age twenty-eight and his chances of marriage would plummet? It is easier to intentionally fuck up your life when you think that no one gives a shit about you, that you’re the one they expect to fail. It’s easier to say they don’t understand what it means to be an artist when your strongest associations with them are coercive motherhood, a cultish domesticity, a type of virulent femininity dependent on your relinquishment of all power to someone with different genitals than you. He remembers the first time he told his parents to fuck off. 

“ _Ma-po tofu,_ Sir,” 

“Huh?”

He can’t be more than nineteen. The server delicately sets Roxas’s dish down, refills his water with a courtesy and grace that makes him want to squeal, and moves on to the next table. 

He slurps up the food with wanton lust, his eyes practically jumping out of his head, and the hot tea soothes his overused throat. Singing, he decides, is so much fucking work. And in the middle of his catharsis, he again notices the business-looking guy from earlier. He notices that he’s staring again, his mouth a few centimeters open, and he can’t take it.

“Can I fucking help you?”

He’s taken aback, clearly surprised, and shoots his eyes down. “N-no, sorry…”

“No, I want to know. What. Tell me.”

It’s a small restaurant, R&G, a place he goes to often; the staff knows him by name (“Roxas, good to see you!”), knows his moods and meager tips and good intentions and that he gives free concerts to them once a year. The guy who’s dressed in _navy_ , navy of all colors, has the gall to stare at him as he eats in his own territory?

“Um,” he starts, fiddling with his chopsticks, “I’ve just…” With each passing second, he becomes redder. “I’ve seen someone eat like that before.”

The server, Ay, hears the suit, and stifles a laugh. Roxas glowers at him, annoyed, that he has seen through his Audrey Hepburn facade; you can doll yourself up in all of the designer name scarves, shoes, and blouses, but you can’t take the unkempt habits out of the poor kid. The _poor_ kid.

“Hmm,” Roxas leans back, his temper quelled. “Alright, I accept that.” He picks up his bowl and walks to his table, silently delighting in his obvious uncertainty with the situation. “Hi, I’m Roxas.” He stretches out his hand as if he’s done this a million times before. 

“What’s that you’re eating?” The guy smells like lemongrass and his hair is tied back in a low bun, like some version of a clean-shaven samurai.

“Tofu. Are you alright?” He can’t believe how inept he is, how he comes off as someone who hasn’t had a human interaction in years.

He pauses, alarmed. “What? I feel fine. Why do you ask?”

“Uh. First of all, you’re wearing navy. Who the hell would wear that? You were also literally staring at me earlier,” he motions to his now-abandoned table. “So you’re either autistic or really unaware of yourself. So you tell me.”

Axel is too shocked to respond at first; he bites his lower lip. _I’m Axel_ , he knows he should say. _Fucking Tifa. Fucking meeting cancellation. I’m Axel. I work at the Metropolitan Intercity Railway as their CFO. I’m thirty-four and—_

“Hello?” Roxas waves at the stranger, feeling a stirring in his chest. 

“I’m Axel,” he says, his face as red as a beet. “My meetings were all canceled today. I usually never come to the Crescent Downtown for anything, much less lunch. My secretary told me about this place, though, she said it had great noodles. Chow fun, if I recall correctly.” He steadies his breath, his executive confidence flooding back into him. “Also, I’m not an autist. That’s pretty offensive to say, actually,”

Roxas shrugs and continues slurping down the tofu, downing the tea. “Whatever, I don’t know you.” He decides that he’s dead weight, a useless rudder, an untuned string.

“Alright. So, what about you? Are you some sympathy customer here?” Without warning, he scans him, feeling a sense of vengefulness flood into him for having been so scrutinized under his gaze. “So it looks like those clothes are old, but your nails and hair are immaculate, which tells me that you have expensive habits but not necessarily a strong income. You’re obviously very extroverted, so you’re probably confident, maybe a performer type. Or you’re a rich only child who just takes daddy’s money and runs all over the world.” He sees a reaction start in him, making its way up his spine like a slow prickling. “Oh, strike a chord? What’s next, Bogota?”

Roxas, without preamble, reaches under the table for Axel’s pocket, and he nearly yelps as Roxas’s hand quickly slides past his groin and slips the wallet from his pocket. He empties its contents on the table, livid. “Just what I’d expect. Black Visa, a few hundreds, an old license. No photos of those dear to you,” he holds a hundred in the air, waving it around his face, “mind if I pay with this?”

Axel is still reeling, his right leg covered in ridiculous goosebumps, his body rising in temperature. _I’m Axel, I’m thirty-four, the CFO of a company, and I haven’t had time for a girlfriend in six years._

“G-go ahead,” he can barely speak, can barely even look at him, can’t stand the sight of his bow-shaped lips, his swan-like neck. 

He stops Ay as he walks by, winks at him, “keep the change.” He nods and bows gracefully, having received something like a $70 tip, and gives them two fortune cookies.

“One for you and one for boyfriend.”

Axel and Roxas freeze then, eyes locked on each other. 

He glares at Axel’s smirking face. “Fuck you.” 

Roxas stands up, shakes out his hair, and looks at Axel one more time. He refuses his gaze and stands to match him. “Need something, sweetheart?” His voice is laced with daggers.

“Nothing at all, dear,” he makes his way toward the exit, and to his displeasure, he follows him out the door, his jaw strong and unforgiving. “What, are you fucking following me now?”

“Only one exit.” He points to the narrow threshold. Roxas smells like orchids and looks like he should be in a magazine. It was too bad that he was so prickly, so judgmental, lonely.

“Whatever. Just leave me alone,” Roxas feels for his phone, now vibrating in his pocket. He debates taking the call in front of him — _Incoming call: Sora_ — and then glares at him, because why the fuck shouldn’t he, and answers. “Sora, hey.” 

Axel watches him, and he can’t decide if it’s solely to annoy her, or if he’s actually interested in the call. Once Roxas turns back to face him, a few minutes into the conversation, Axel makes sure that Roxas sees him roll his eyes, then casually walks off back toward his office, just a mile away. He felt odd, like maybe he should have thanked him for sitting with him, but then he remembers that he practically stole a hundred from him just to prove a point — to the both of them, that he has too much cash to care for, that he can do that to him — and he decides to stop caring. Too much emotion. Too much gray, hippie complexity. Bullshit.

But then he realizes that Roxas still has his wallet, and he’s only four blocks away from the restaurant when he runs into him, his face clearly changed. 

“Roxas,” he says, surprised. “I need my wallet.” 

He hands it to him without pause, and he’s again caught off guard.

“Something the matter?”

“Um,” his eyes are downcast, and he’s rubbing his arms, “no.”

“Odd. I didn’t take you for a liar, of all things.”

“What’s it to you?” Roxas looks at him with changeling eyes, ready to strike him down. 

“It was just my roommate. Er, sort-of roommate. I was crashing with him for a few weeks,”

“Was?”

“Yeah.”

Then Axel put two and two together, and he was overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, of conflict. “Are you fucking homeless?”

He shakes his head. “No,” swallowing his spit, he shrugs. “Well, I dunno. I was evicted last week. Sora said his landlord found out I was staying there, rent-free.”

“Oh,” Axel puts his hands in his pockets and looks at the sidewalk. “I mean,” he shakes his head, and then his words come up like vomit. “I have an extra room, if you need. Like, a lot of extra rooms, if you need.” 

His mouth tightens. What would it mean, to go to some strange, not-autist’s apartment, that he met at R&G? Would he charge? Would he expect him to fuck for each night he was there? What kind of pervert weirdo would be thirty-four and no wife, no girlfriend, nothing? Did he have atrocious habits, was he abusive? Roxas is desperate, has nowhere to go, and he’s singing at the Met next week, and he really needs the money. He only slept in Central Park once, and the mud seeped into his underwear and gave him a UTI for weeks, and he decides that being fucked by Axel would be better than sleeping on a bumpy park bench. 

“Do you have a piano?”

* * *

  
  


In the beginning, it was like living with a ghost. Axel’s presence around his apartment was sparse: a few coffee grounds by the faucet here and there, the uncurtained balconies, the polite shuffling of slippers on tile at 7 in the morning. He woke Roxas, questioned his morning habits. Axel learned to buy pulp-free organic orange juice every week, learned to be okay with someone else sucking up the Internet bandwidth, and stopped listening to his nightly podcasts because, at night time, Roxas practiced singing. The first time he heard it, it sounded like some distant echo, something not quite beautiful and not quite modest. Axel gingerly crept from his heat-controlled bathroom, white towel still wrapped around his torso, to the parlor, where he set up a grand piano for guests to play at house parties, and sunk into the floor, just out of sight, in the safe and darkened hallway. Uttering spitfire latinate phrases, breathing heavily and then sometimes lightly, cursing when he forgot to attack the vowel, Axel saw him in his mind’s eye, struggling at the piano bench. He wondered if he walked to the windows, like he did, to give herself breaks every now and then. 

When Axel would come home from work, he often saw Roxas situated on the couch, a sugary doughnut in one hand, and a piece of sheet music in the other. It wasn’t easy, not by any means, cohabitating with someone. By the fourth month, they were almost friends; they texted each other when they knew they would get home past midnight, would call during the day to see if Roxas needed orange juice or if Axel needed seltzer water. Roxas was a wreck, a complete slob, leaving his dishes in the sink with crusted-over eggs like some acrylic custard, and didn’t he fucking get it, that the orange would stain the china? But didn’t _he_ get it, that you shouldn’t use china if you don’t want it to be eaten on?

After he sang at the Met — which he didn’t dare to mention to Axel, when he still thought he was a cloying bastard — his monthly income became more steady. His exposure had skyrocketed, and he booked at least one gig a week that paid two grand. At age twenty-nine, he was far behind in his singing career, the most backlogged of any musician from his cohort seven years prior. Beautiful Kairi had booked herself with the Baroque Orchestra of Venice for years; Namine pulled in a fortune in annual income from her well-paying performances. But Roxas, who had let himself atrophy immediately following graduation, the most critical time to sink or swim as a young professional, knew he was a failure, didn’t care to mention it to anyone else. His overly pragmatic family had won the argument at long last; music was a hobby and not a job. Axel knew it too, for god’s sake, he got off on having him in his house, rent-free and no strings attached, like some sick charity project. Fucking Axel, with his straight-edged career, his six-figure salary and sneering judgments; he hated Axel for a long time. He felt like a sign of infamy: unmarried, crass, jagged in all the wrong places, well-mannered enough to sit at Christmas Puddings but not enough to fool some bullshit CFO while gobbling Chinese food. Roxas texted Axel one afternoon, after he closed a deal with a major nonprofit to sponsor the hygiene of the individual trains. Outsourcing, he once told Roxas, was the key to maintaining high profit margins.

_Hey._

Axel’s phone buzzes as soon as he closes the door to the conference room. _Hey._

It doesn’t even take a minute for the three dots to show up in their text conversation — he also bought him an iPhone, the day after he hauled his whopping three bags into his place, after sneering at the pathetic Firefly flip phone.

_I can pay you rent._

He grinned and sent a curt reply: _My venmo is Axel-Marrin-1. Cough it up._

It is irritating, having to reminder him every fucking month, to pay him on the first. He would only let him pay $500 because, what’s the point, he didn’t need the money. He planned on saving up all of the rent and then giving it back to him once he moved out. And in these internal conversations with himself, he couldn’t help but frown for only a moment. _When._

Criminal Intent proved to be a boring podcast, he thought, in the sixth month listening to it. Fluorescent sterility, the overhead lighting on each train car, began to annoy him like something mighty; the oppressive glare reminded him of underground societies, where you weren’t allowed to go outside or turn your face toward the warm and golden sun. Oh, and he stopped wearing navy immediately after Roxas insulted his poor choice in wardrobe. Mid-level managers invited him to golf more often, and a few of the interns started to spend more time in his office, drawing silly diagrams on his giant whiteboard, asking him if he would explain to them supply and demand, and what was it like winning the famous robotics competition when he was only nineteen? He flew into a fervor, mouth rushing faster than he could process, and soon the other executives had meandered into his office space, puzzled to see their no-nonsense CFO lighting up, passionate, full of feeling and vibrancy. The memories of college floated in his head, and he felt somewhere inside the old blissfulness of optimism. Of futurism. In fact, he felt is so strongly that, at happy hour that night, on some swanky rooftop in New York, where you could see the rivers pulsing and the sexy silhouette of the city against the turquoise sky, he remembered Roxas’ lips and his porcelain skin, and then after another smoky shot of whiskey, he remembered when he brought some tall, long-haired guy home and fucked him in the shower; and he felt the prickling of anger and jealousy so strongly that he cozied up to some bouncy blonde at the bar, cozied up to her so much that they fucked in the marbled bathroom and he imagined his sort-of-friend, sort-of-roommate the entire time. 

“Congrats,” Roxas said that night when Axel stumbled into their (his?) apartment, his tie loosened and hair sticking in all directions. Roxas was in the kitchen pouring himself a glass of ice-cold orange juice, pulp-free, dressed in a devastating black kimono that went to the floor and highlighted his shoulders, his tanned collarbone. Axel gazed at Roxas, feeling the alcohol slowly dilute, and thought he looked like the only person in existence.

“Why congrats?” He asked, slowly walking over to the kitchen.

He scoffed and took a gulp of juice. “Finally got laid,” he smiles but it’s not a real smile. “Nice job, Boss.”

“What?” And he doesn’t know when, exactly, he started to care what Roxas thought of him. He pulled his jacket off, tossed it on the table, and gave him a pointed look. “Why do you give a fuck?”

“I don’t. I’m just saying, congrats. It’s good to see you a little disheveled is all.” 

Maybe it was after they watched The Sound of Music together, when Roxas hinted vaguely at his own insecurities at his late musicianship, his so-far wasted life spent doing too many drugs and not singing enough scales. Maybe it was after he snuck away from work on the day he sang at the Met — he read the news — and heard him spill Italian poetry from his aching lips, like a swirling gulf of roses and latin and ritualism. It may have started the hour after being spellbound by his performance, he thinks now; he rushed back to his office, practically sprinted into the building, and pulled up all of the Italian arias he could find on Google, searched for translations of his songs, and was lulled into a prophetic slumber of artwork, privileging himself the thought that he sang to him those godly words of the spirit. How could Roxas ever think himself a failure?

“Hey,” Axel walked to Roxas’s side of the kitchen, “why are you saying that?” He looks anywhere but his mouth, lest he know that he’s been thinking of him for a whole week straight.

“Why do you think?” He’s acidic and cold, dismissive. It’s the closest they’ve ever been, he realizes. It had been weeks of them, in their eighth month living together, watching old movies late at night, their feet both draped in afghans across the couch. It’s been weeks of him gazing longingly at Axel’s forearms, of Axel wanting to pull the afghan from Roxas’s legs and feel his ankles.

It was somewhere in the middle of it all, Axel decides, when Roxas starts to walk away from him at the sink, that he grabs for his hand, and he bites his lip to keep from shouting, and when Roxas tries to push him away, Axel falters, eyes full of concern, and then Roxas sees him — really sees him, sees his ordinariness fade away — and pulls Axel toward him, their lips smashing into each other like a car crash. It’s definitely somewhere in the middle, they both decide, nodding into each other’s bodies, shuddering and gasping as they orgasm like it’s the end of the world. Whether it was the Spanish or the Italian, the lack of life lived or the hackneyed way of living in complete decadence, they collided into each other, two perfect storms without a center, both swirling at high speeds. 

Sometimes Roxas can’t speak to him because he just can’t, he’ll insist, and that’s when Axel learns how to kiss him to sleep, to massage his hands until he feels okay to talk again. He learns to appreciate Roxas’s well-trained choral tongue, learns to undress him with an agility he thought he’d never possess, and Roxas learns to take him apart, one bar by one bar, to get at his interiority, to take away the machine inside of him. 

It’s difficult in the beginning, they both discover, as they realize that they’ve fallen in love with the form of a human opposite their own passions. Axel never sings, only invests; he buys pianos for their looks, not for playing. Roxas thought Axel initially knew nothing about love — didn’t know how to play, how to tell silly stories, or cry together — but he realizes, in a certain light, that he bathes the same way as him, with unscented soaps and warm, bubbly water; and he wants to take it apart, he and Axel, so he sits with him in his iron-clawed bathtub, helps wash his long red hair and Axel rubs sunscreen on Roxas’s back where he can’t reach. Roxas’s raw heart learns to accept support, and Axel learns to recognize beauty in places he thought possible — the alleys of Cambodia, the ivy on the side of stucco houses, in the smell of Turkish coffees and clinking dinner plates late at night along the Thames — and he sees it, now more than ever, where it hid from him his entire life. 

He learned to play Fur Elise. The notes are clunky, disconnected. The articulation fails to resolve the song; Axel forgets to end Fur Elise with the harmonic sixth instead of the minor third, and at times, he tosses the book behind him, embarrassed that the hours of practice haven’t inscribed themselves into his hands, the very flow of his fingers. He’s reminded of all of the times he’s failed before, from the bulls in Spain to the arcane worship of train lights on his way to work; but when he relaxes, feels the despair and optimism of the musician, there is a release. 

Roxas hugs him from behind, a strange sensation of gratefulness flooding his stomach as he sees Axel at the piano bench. His technique is horrible, Roxas says, sliding onto the bench beside him, placing his fingers over the other’s, but he’ll learn. If he listens to his careful instruction, and if he can pay his steep price, he’ll learn.

“Teach me, then,” Axel says, smiling into his mouth.

“Certainly, Mr. Marrin.” Roxas swivels around to sit on his lap, and gently touches his cheek, feeling nothing but the weight of gravity and the pull of the moon as he closes the distance between their lips, a somatic ritual to which they both give, give, give. Relentlessly.


End file.
